42, PANORAMA STREET, HAVANA FROM THE GARDEN TO THE JUNGLE: OTHER WAYS OF UNDERSTANDING THE NON HUMAN IN THE WORK OF WIFREDO LAM (1942–1946)

Abstract

After living for seventeen years in Europe, Wifredo Lam left the war-devastated continent in 1941 and returned to Cuba. This return to his homeland is one of the most important moments in his career and marks a major shift in the history of Caribbean art. Within a few months, Lam left behind the refined anthropomorphic figures of his Parisian period, briefly engaged in oil portraiture, and experimented with gouache on marouflé paper, creating a series of paintings that would lead him to La Jungla (The Jungle), which many consider the foundational masterpiece of Latin American contemporary art. It is generally agreed that his return to his homeland provoked three changes in Wifredo Lam's artistic stance. First, the relationship with the extraordinary in reality ceased to be expressed through the Surrealist grammar of power hidden in the unconscious and began to be expressed in the form of a marvelous realism capable of encompassing local beliefs and myths. Second, the European revolutionary struggles — Wifredo Lam was a committed Marxist who fought on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War — were progressively transformed in the mediated Republic of Cuba into an anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist positioning. Finally, the reference to African art, so entrenched in the artistic practices of the interwar Parisian avant-garde, became in Lam a song for the recognition of Caribbean cultures of African origin.